The Goal Business

Normally I don't give a flying V what goes on down South, especially obscure bits of suburbia that you can barely find with a tube map. But I'm getting more than a bit hacked off with Fulham.

Not that I've got any particular beef with that particular patch of West London, and it can continue to exist quite happily for as long as it likes. But the way that its Football Club has been having a winge of late is really getting my goat.

Here's the skinny. One of London's little football clubs who only ever seemed to pop up in FA Cup games, Pools forms and coverage of the boat race. Went there a few times and found a very nice tidy little football ground that looked like a giant Subbuteo pitch. Lots of old fellers with bobble hats and rattles. Roy Of The Rovers stuff.

Then some rich fool with money to burn starts to pump cash into the old place like there's no tomorrow. Pays top dollar to jobbing Euro professionals and brings in fancy bastards like Kevin Keegan and Ray Wilkins to teach em what that white thing with the net is for.

And before you know it, this quaint little cardboard football club is getting a bit good.

At the same time, West London football neighbours in a nastier part of town with real fans and playing proper footie (QPR) are allowed to rot away to the lower divisions. Fast forward a few years the latter are in administration and the fancy buggers down the road are planning to level their happy little terraced ground and turn it into some huge 30,000 plus Palazzio Del Fulham.

They get the nod from the local planners and the bulldozers roll. End of an era etc etc. Then the local Nimbys fight back. These folks are a bit miffed that the little football ground tucked up against the River Thames is going to turn their quiet posh locale into a mass of seething hooligans every other week, so they start to fight back.

Meanwhile the posh new Fulham mercenaries have to find another ground while this expensive new place is built, and they turn to their local rivals QPR to ground share. QPR need the dosh so they say yes.

But the funny thing is, even though Fulham Football Club are building this 30,000+ monstrosity down the road they notice that the fans are not coming to games. Attendances are dropping. The rich buggers are not too chuffed about this and start slagging off their own fans for not supporting their mercenary team. And its beginning to dawn on folks that people actually liked the old place, with it's old fashioned atmosphere, and might not like some rich playboy transforming the place into a Star Wars set.

In the meantime some of the oldest and finest football clubs in the country are in serious trouble. Barnsley FC, who not so long ago were playing in the Premiership for the first time, and have transformed its own ground into a superb modern sporting facility are less than twenty days away from ruin. If some cash isn't found fast they could be the first top club to be closed mid season in recent memory. Deadline November 11th

A few miles down Sheffield Road you find Hillsborough, home of Sheffield Wednesday, who are more than 20 mill in debt and have been bailed out by some local moneybags. Across Sheffield we have another club, The Blades, making a genuine promotion run and finding that for the sake of a mill and a half have to bail out and sell their best players to make ends meet.

Then there's Huddersfield Town FC with its proud youth football academy, and Bradford City struggling to pay the wages. Football is no longer a game for the financially faint hearted.

It just makes my blood boil that some bugger with a ton of dosh can turn a perfectly ordinary lowly football club that hasn't appeared on the radar for half a century into a massive sporting dinosaur. For the Fulham owners who have been playing at being sporting moguls for five years to turn on their own fans for being ungrateful is a bit galling whoever you support. Many of those old Fulham fans clearly see all this as a bad dream. The caterpillar was quite happy being a caterpillar, before some butterfly butted in.

Blogga.